Angel producer to pen 'Moon' screenplay

Genre TV producer Tim Minear (Angel, Wonderfalls) told SCI FI Wire that he has been hired to write a screenplay adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's 1966 SF novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The novel deals with a 2076 rebellion on a former penal colony on the moon and has been read as an allegory about libertarianism and its costs. "I'm going to write the script," Minear, an avowed Heinlein fan, said in an interview. "My take on the story is to try to stay as close to Heinlein's politics and Heinlein's vision of the future that I can, while still taking the story and trying to make it into a movie. You know, that book is not a movie. There's a lot of very interesting talk about cells and sort of the anatomy of a revolution, which is not that interesting in a movie. But there are other elements." Minear got hired to adapt the book when he set out to discover who held the rights to Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. That turned out to be producer David Heyman (the Harry Potter movies). Heyman and producer Mike Medavoy eventually hired Minear to adapt the other Heinlein work, Minear said. Minear said that he wants to follow the example of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who adapted J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for the screen. "Those are magnificently adapted screenplays," he said. "Things are moved around. Things are changed. Just like you would have to when you're adapting something that extensive. But really, really an impressive job of staying so close to ... Tolkien. ... Like, it smells the same as the novels."

President Bush is preparing to unveil a new space initiative with a long-range goal of returning humans to the moon and establishing a permanent presence there, NBC News confirmed Thursday. Government officials said there were still final details that the president had yet to sign off on, but that the announcement was likely to come next week. White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters traveling with the president Thursday that Bush would have more to say about the space program next week. --- Experts said the goal should be to set up a research base on the moon to test technologies that would be useful on a mission to Mars. "The idea is to go to Mars. And the way you get to Mars is you go to the moon, and you practice three days from home. It's the equivalent of climbing Mount Rainier and preparing for Mount Everest," Edward McCurdy, a space-policy expert at American University in Washington, told Reuters.

FUTL gets a C-

As a novel, For Us is not very good. It reads like a cross between a movie script and a rather dry series of lectures on how to create a utopian society, over which Heinlein attempted to drape a slender plot. --- Heinlein fanatics, and there are many, will no doubt find many of the criticisms here overwrought. But Heinlein first-timers would do better to dip their reading toes in Stranger in a Strange Land or Starship Troopers. Only after immersion in Heinlein's superior works can For Us, the Living be appreciated for what it is -- a rather bad novel, but an essential one for those interested in exploring the birth of the Heinlein oeuvre.

The New York Times on Heinlein

Although he set the manuscript aside and later destroyed all the copies in his possession, Heinlein went on to mine this material for his most distinctive short stories and novels. For this reason alone, the belated publication of this early work is a major contribution to the history of the genre.